4 Ways to Have an ROI Impact with Marketing Automation
A good product or service is never enough on its own to generate sales and revenue growth. In fact, many companies build their entire sales strategy on a solid foundation of marketing initiatives and brand recognition.
Successful companies build their marketing and sales strategies around the customer. Their needs, their voice, their engagement levels are accounted for and used to create a marketing strategy based on metric-driven goals.
So, how do businesses gather their customer information, process and interpret it, to use that information in marketing initiatives? The answer is simpler than you would have thought: Marketing Automation!
Marketing Automation: What Is It and Who Can Benefit from It?
Marketing automation systems are the core of successful marketing initiatives and have been proven to increase revenue generation, customer retention, and lower churn.
To put things into perspective, we spoke to Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market at SugarCRM, to determine how intelligent marketing automation tools can be successfully used to generate a more profitable return on marketing investments and nurture a more personal relationship with your audience base.
1. Generate Return on Marketing Investments
As Christian Wettre explains, all enterprises can benefit from Marketing Automation. According to him, all companies that implement such systems can generate a favorable return on these investments, as long as the sales team is updated with all marketing interactions with leads and opportunities.
“Make sure that all marketing responses and marketing interactions are shown to sales. This will increase awareness of lead affinity towards certain products or services and will help your sales team to better plan future interactions with them.”
Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market, SugarCRM
A similar approach enhances communication and collaboration between the sales and marketing departments, increasing profitability and revenue.
2. Market With Relevance
Marketing Automation can bring companies that implement it a significant competitive advantage. One of the best ways to increase your chances of higher revenue generated through marketing is by implementing better marketing segmentation protocols. Sugar Market is one of the few tools that allow and promote higher segmentation capabilities.
“Sugar Market allows you to build a solid database to use in your segmentation attempts, which, in return, allows you to market products and services with more relevance. Such tools enable you to identify different behavior patterns and, based on those, outline multiple lead scoring profiles. Down the line, you’ll be able to feed the right type of content to the right people in your audience base. Marketing a certain product to a group of people that have shown no interest in it is futile, not to mention it only eats up marketing resources.”
Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market, SugarCRM
Creating different scoring profiles helps marketing teams develop more cohesive marketing strategies, market more intelligently, and boost your sales team’s success chances. Besides, it shows your audience that they are listened to and that their needs matter.
“Apart from creating multiple scoring profiles, companies should also track what happens on their websites,” claims Christian. According to him, being mindful of each page’s content, enriching it with appropriate CTAs, and tracking those to the right visitor also enhances the return on marketing investments and your marketing team’s ability to better target the right type of content to the right visitor. Easy to create lead capture forms are also a necessity to better understand customers and create better scoring profiles.
3. Intelligent Nurture Programs
Email marketing is a valuable strategy that all companies can implement. But in most cases, a basic email marketing tool just won’t do the job. Apart from allowing you to send automated emails, marketing automation systems let you personalize your campaigns for a better investment return. According to Christian, a quality marketing automation system should allow you to deploy intelligent nurture campaigns.
“Sugar Market allows you to use intelligent nurture campaigns and elevate your marketing interactions. Sugar Market’s intelligent branching options enable you to dynamically branch campaigns based on how your audience responds to different emails. For example, if you run an email campaign for subscription customers for a certain product, but based on in-email clicks a customer shows interest in a tangential product or service, you can set up your campaign to automatically add the contact to another nurture program for the tangential product or service, and nurture it until it becomes a sales-ready lead.”
Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market, SugarCRM
With intelligent marketing automation systems, everything happens dynamically, without one of your marketing team members’ constant intervention. Similar tools enable marketing departments to market based on confirmed audience preferences, a strategy that has proven to generate better returns and the potential to generate more revenue.
4. Understand the Impact of Your Marketing Efforts
Marketing efforts without insights into results are doomed to failure. According to Christian, marketers need appropriate tools to track and determine the success of their campaigns. Knowing such aspects will help marketers determine more accurately where they need to allocate resources, where they need to improve interactions, messaging, or strategies.
“Sugar Market’s Advanced Analytics tool has Google Looker embedded into the software, which offers marketers access to sophisticated analytics and data about their marketing interactions. Using big data analytics, you can quickly adjust your marketing programs to how people respond to different types of content and strategies.”
Christian Wettre, GM, Sugar Sell & Sugar Market, SugarCRM
Looking Ahead
In the era of intelligent marketing interactions, marketers need to adapt and only embrace some of the highest performing tools and systems. Unlocking your organization’s potential with marketing automation begins with Sugar Market but only ends at the bounds of your creativity.
